Short Session Description: Toward a Sustainable Embedded Librarian Program

Full Session Description:

This session will describe how a small university library worked to develop a more sustainable way of meeting the research needs of students enrolled in online courses. Initially, we embedded individual librarians in online courses, to provide content and monitor the library-related discussion forums within. With limited staffing and tight budgets and with the population of online students growing rapidly, we were struggling to continue in this fashion.

Working with the Ed-Tech and Hybrid Learning Department, the library was able to move from that labor-intensive approach to creating course-specific LibGuides, and linking to those from Moodle (our Learning Management System). This provided easy access to resources and subject librarians via chat, email, phone, and text, with back-up coverage from other librarians. No course was dependent on a single, "embedded" librarian any longer.

The next step involved a programmer from our administrative computing department. He made a smart widget that would be added to over one thousand courses in our Moodle LMS. The widget is "smart" because it knows when a LibGuide exists for a certain course by matching Moodle course names to LibGuides with that tag. This strategic re-positioning of the librarian left us with an embedded presence, without the entanglement of being personally in the course, allowing for a sustainable program.